Cause of missing Malaysia Air jet remains mystery

10/03/2014

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The missing Malaysia Airlines passenger continues to baffle investigators. Reports of a rectangular object floating in the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam emerged yesterday but efforts to locate the object have proven to be fruitless so far.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on Saturday when it suddenly disappeared from radar around 2 hours into the flight. There were 239 people on board and it had been thought that the reported object may have been a door belonging to the Boeing 777 jet.

There are suggestions that the plane may have actually turned back shortly into the flight with Rodzali Daud of the Malaysian air force saying "We are trying to make sense of this, the military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back, and in some parts this was corroborated by civilian radar."

The search effort has been significantly ramped up with more than 40 ships and over 30 aircraft coordinating search efforts. This team is to be joined today by an FBI team from the US to help with the investigation.

It emerged over the weekend that a couple of passengers had boarded the flight using stolen EU passports which has fueled speculation that the reasons the plane went missing were terrorist related.

A hijacking is therefore not being ruled out at this stage. Peter King of homeland security in the US is urging caution regarding this saying “First of all we don’t know what happened. There was no distress call, there was no mayday, there was no signal of any kind but the plane came out of Malaysia, which has been a hub of hijack activity."